The Heretic’s Treasure

A day he’d never forget. There’d been a time, years ago, when the memory of it used to fill his dreams almost every night. Now the nightmare visited him only sporadically. But he’d never thought it was going to return to haunt him like this. He closed his eyes, and suddenly he was reliving the events as though it had happened yesterday.

* * *

For the entire decade of the nineties, the West African country of Sierra Leone, one of the most deprived and corrupt nations on the planet, had been consumed in violent civil war. Atrocities were committed wholesale-burnings, machete hackings and mass executions became commonplace. Towns and villages were razed to the ground as brutal gangs of self-styled rebels rampaged through the countryside, murdering and raping everyone in their path. Among the rebel fighters were child soldiers as young as eight, drugged and brainwashed into a state of zombie-like inhumanity, who had been handed automatic weapons and commanded to kill, kill, kill. Which they did, ruthlessly and without compunction.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world watched with little interest. Just another African tribal war. Just another Congo. Just another Rwanda. To the cold Western political mind, African lives were cheap, generally not worth intervening over. So the suffering and bloodshed went on unabated, and men like Ben could only watch and wait and hope that one day they’d be given the order that could help make a small difference to those innocent victims.

The worst of the rebel groups operating in Sierra Leone at that time had been a vicious militia force, several hundred strong, calling itself the Cross Bones Boys. Its thirty-year-old leader was a psychopathic despot known as The Baron, whose idea of amusement was to order the limb-hacking, followed not too quickly by the beheading, of entire village populations. Under his command, the militia was cutting a swathe of death through the country. Whatever political or idealistic motivation it might have started out with when war had first broken out had long since been perverted. For years, they’d been left pretty much to their own devices as civil war tore the country apart. There was so much blood soaked into the soil that it seemed nobody even cared any more.

But in May 1997, six years into the war, the Cross Bones Boys broke the unwritten rules by daring to kidnap, and then butcher, three Western aid workers. At that point, orders had come from on high that reprisals be carried out against The Baron and his militia. Ben’s SAS squadron, headed up by Lt. Col. Harry Paxton, had been flown into the country aboard a UN aid aircraft and stationed clandestinely at the British Embassy in Freetown.

Officially, the SAS were never there. Unofficially, the mission objectives were simply to capture or kill as many of the Cross Bones Boys as possible, including The Baron himself, and chase off the rest. In theory, it was the kind of job the SAS were born for.

It hadn’t been that easy in practice. With the whole country locked down in terror and suppression, MI6 intelligence agents struggled to gain any leads as to the whereabouts of the Cross Bones Boys and their leader. For two weeks the SAS squadron had waited on standby, ready to move at a moment’s notice. It had been a frustrating, tense time.

Finally, agents had received a tip-off. The news was promising. In two days, The Baron and his second-in-command, Captain Kananga, would be passing through a Catholic mission on the banks of a river delta called Makapela Creek. The building complex had been deserted since back in 1992, early in the war, after the resident nuns and priest had been brutally slaughtered by another marauding rebel group. It was exactly the kind of place the Cross Bones leadership might hole up for a day or two and, according to the intelligence source, The Baron and Kananga would only have a light force of men with them.

An eight-man SAS team were quickly assembled and tooled up. A Chinook from RAF Special Forces 7 Squadron had flown them deep into the jungle. From the Landing Zone they’d trekked through the damp greenery and stifling heat. Reaching the Makapela Creek mission after dark, they’d got into position for the assault. It was meant to have been swift, surgical and decisive.

It hadn’t quite turned out that way.

As the assault got underway, it quickly became clear that there was a much greater enemy force in the area than the intelligence reports had led anyone to believe. Militia soldiers suddenly burst out of hidden positions in the trees.

Hundreds of them. A rag-tag army swathed in cartridge belts, fired up with bloodlust and crack cocaine, heavily armed and running at them like demons.

Before anyone knew what was happening, a wild firefight had erupted across the whole mission complex. It had been mayhem, fast and furious and deadly. The jungle was lit up with the muzzle flashes of automatic weapons as the enemy started closing in. Gunfire exploded from everywhere. Within minutes the SAS team had found themselves encircled and cut off. They’d established positions in and around the buildings and fought back ferociously as bullets pinged and zipped all about them.

But they were massively outnumbered and, however many bodies piled up in the killing ground around the mission, more screaming Cross Bones Boys kept pouring out of the jungle. The SAS squad were in real trouble, and they knew it. Once they’d run out of ammunition, the militia rebels would close in to take them alive. The ensuing machete party would provide hours of macabre entertainment for The Baron.

One by one, Ben watched his teammates go down. Milne and Jarvis were blown to pieces by a rocket-propelled grenade round that ripped through the building they were firing from. Clark, the radio operator, had been crouched right next to Ben in the roofless wreck of the old chapel when he’d taken a .50-calibre machine gun bullet that left his head like a scooped-out walnut shell.

Ben had used his last grenade to destroy the concealed machine gun emplacement from where the shots had come. Moving low through the insane torrents of gunfire, he’d clambered over Clark’s corpse and used the radio to call in air support. At that moment, he’d felt the hot punch of a bullet take him in the shoulder. He staggered, but stayed on his feet.

After that, Ben’s memories were hazy. He remembered the searing heat of flames tearing through the mission buildings. The constant frenzied chaos of gunfire. The screams that pierced the night. The bodies of his comrades lying slumped where they’d fallen. The blur of shapes darting between buildings as the enemy kept on coming. His teammate, Smith, crouching a few yards away with his rifle tight against his shoulder, firing right, firing left.

Suddenly the sky had been filled with roaring thunder as the air support came storming in out of the night-two Lynx helicopters, spotlights sweeping the jungle, flame blazing from their miniguns. Trees snapped and fell, enemy soldiers were mowed down as others ran in a panic. The downdraught of the choppers blasted dust and vegetation into the air, tore the tin roofs from what was left of the mission buildings.

As Ben glanced up at the hovering aircraft, he was suddenly pitched forward on his face by a second bullet. His vision went dim. He fought to stay conscious, struggled to get to his knees. Tried to twist around to see who had shot him. He could feel hot blood spilling out of him.

He remembered rolling over onto his back. Through the haze of his fading senses, hearing another shot and seeing Smith crumple into the dirt nearby.

Out of the shadows stepped a man, silhouetted against the flames. He was holding a gun. Ben watched, dazed, as the man came closer and pointed the gun right at his head.

He remembered seeing the man come closer, step into the flickering firelight. The gun steady in his fist, ready for the killing shot. Behind the gun, the eyes in the black face wide and staring at him through the sights. Ben would never forget those eyes, bloodshot and wild, full of hate. They were burned into his brain forever.

After that, there had been a flurry of shots.

Then nothing. Just darkness and empty silence.

He was dead.

But suddenly, amazingly, he wasn’t.

His next memory was of waking up in a soft bed in a military hospital. The first thing he’d seen when he opened his eyes was Harry Paxton sitting by his bedside, anxiously watching over him like a father with a sick child.

Eight men had gone in that day; only two had come out.

And if it hadn’t been for Paxton, it would have been Ben inside one of the bodybags that had been choppered away from the smoking ruin in the aftermath of the firefight.

Harry Paxton, last man standing. It was one of those tales of heroism that was destined to become enshrined in regimental legend. For a long time afterwards, men had retold the tale-maybe they were still telling it now, years later. How Kananga, the Cross Bones militia captain, his forces scattering under air attack, had murdered Sergeant Smith and been just about to execute the injured Major Hope with a bullet to the head when Paxton had stepped in to save him. How the Lieutenant Colonel had selflessly got in the way of the bullet meant for the Major, before shooting Kananga with the last round from his pistol.

The rest of the story had come together gradually as Ben recuperated in the hospital over the next couple of weeks.

By the time the reinforcement squad of paratroopers from 1 Para had arrived, it had all been over. Paxton’s unit had accomplished its objective. The Cross Bones Boys were largely wiped out. Nobody ever knew what happened to The Baron. He’d either managed to escape, or never been there in the first place-but that didn’t detract from the victory, and in any case he was never heard of again.

It had been one of the gravest losses of life in the regiment’s history. Back in Hereford, the fallen had been laid to rest with full military honours. Amid the grief, Harry Paxton, arm in a sling from his bullet wound, was the hero of the hour. Plaudits and decorations had been heaped upon him, and soon afterwards he’d been given the promotion to full colonel.

As for Ben, nothing in his military experience had ever quite moved him the way Paxton’s actions had done. He’d sworn he would do anything to return the favour to the man who’d saved him. Nothing-nothing–was ever going to stand in the way of that.

Chapter Eleven

Ben snapped back to the here and now, and glanced at his watch. Time was passing quickly, and Paxton was waiting for his decision.

But he already knew what he had to do.

There was no way he could refuse the colonel’s request. He had too big a debt to repay the man. He couldn’t just walk away.

One last time. Then the slate would be clean and it would be over. It was the least he could do for the hero who had saved his life.

And yet…the prospect of carrying out this task filled him with revulsion.

Unable to bear it any more, he jumped up and headed out of the hotel. The street outside was bustling with the first of the season’s tourists. He filtered through the crowds and just followed his nose, trying to keep himself occupied with the ambience of the town, the architecture, the winding backstreets filled with interesting little shops, the colourful sprawl of spring flower displays that San Remo was famous for.

After a while he suddenly realised he’d wandered near to the hotel where Kerry was staying. He checked his watch. A couple of hours had gone by since he’d left her there. He thought about going in to check on her, make sure she was OK. Maybe she’d have time for a coffee or something. The distraction would be good for him, to help get his head straight and calm his thoughts a little.

The hotel wasn’t the finest establishment he’d ever seen, with a smell of damp in the air and a frayed path across the entrance to the reception desk. He guessed Kerry was a traveller on a budget, just passing through. It struck him how little he knew about her.

He walked up to the desk. Behind it was a bleary-eyed man reading a newspaper through a pair of dirty half-moon glasses. He peered over the top of them as Ben approached. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked in Italian.

‘I’m a friend of one of your guests,’ Ben replied. ‘Her name’s Kerry Wallace. I don’t have a room number. Could you call her for me, please?’

The receptionist grunted, chucked down his paper and started leafing through the old-fashioned register on the desk in front of him. He flipped a few pages back and forth, peering through the dusty glasses at the columns of names.

He looked up. ‘There is no Kerry Wallace here.’

‘She’s checked out?’

‘No, Signore, there is no Kerry Wallace on the register. We have had no guest of that name.’

‘She was here two hours ago. I saw her come in. Were you on duty then?’

The man’s brow wrinkled with annoyance. He glared heavily at Ben. ‘I think perhaps you have the wrong hotel, Signore’

Ben glared back at him. ‘No, this is the right place. You’re making a mistake.’

The receptionist let out an exasperated huff. He spun the register around on the counter. ‘See for yourself.’

Ben ran his eye down the open pages. Frowned. Flipped a page. Scanned down the names. Flipped another page. Checked the dates going back a month. The guy was right. Nobody called Kerry Wallace, or Miss K. Wallace, or anything remotely resembling her name, had checked into the hotel.

‘I’m sorry to have troubled you,’ he said to the receptionist. ‘My mistake.’

The man grunted again and flapped his newspaper back up in front of his face.

Ben left the hotel, puzzled. Had he got it wrong? He’d seen her walk in there. It was perplexing. He thought about it for a moment, and shrugged. A woman on her own, getting into trouble with men chasing her: maybe she’d wanted to be cautious and had given him a false name. But then again, she’d trusted him enough to go off to a strange yacht with him.

What the hell. It didn’t matter that much. As long as she was safe. He had enough on his mind without worrying about Kerry Wallace.

He looked at his watch. He still had quite a while before he had to head back to the harbour for his dinner rendezvous on board the Scimitar. He walked on. It was warm and close, and dark clouds were beginning to gather overhead. The burning electric smell of a coming thunderstorm hung in the air.

He turned into the street where his hotel was, and the tall white building came into view a hundred yards further on. As he walked, he threw a casual glance to his right at a second-hand bookshop. It had a striped awning and stands of old hardbacks sitting out on the pavement. He’d always been drawn to those kinds of places, and sometimes when he was in Paris he’d spend a whole afternoon browsing around the bookshops by the Seine. It took him into a different world, helped him to forget the real one.

He glanced inside the shop. It was shady and inviting, and for a moment he was tempted to go inside, but decided against it. This wasn’t the time.

Just as he was about to walk on, he noticed something inside the shop.

Someone inside the shop, browsing the shelves of dusty hardbacks.

She was wearing cream cotton trousers and a light blue silk blouse that accentuated the colour of her eyes and the gold of her hair. She turned to face him.

It was Zara Paxton.

Ben felt a surge of anger at the way his heart jumped when he saw her. He did his best to cover it up, and walked towards her with a smile. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’ he said.

‘Yes, what a surprise,’ she laughed. ‘I was shopping in the town, and I remembered this little bookshop. It’s got a good poetry section.’ She waved the book she was holding. ‘I found this. Samuel Taylor Coleridge.’

‘It’s good to see you,’ he replied uncertainly.

‘Good to see you too.’

He stood there for a second, feeling awkward. ‘I’ve decided what I’m going to do,’ he said. ‘I’m taking the job. Going to Cairo.’

‘Harry will be so pleased. It’s kind of you to help him.’

Another silence. ‘Well, see you this evening, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll be staying overnight on board, and I guess I’m leaving in the morning.’

‘Ben, do you fancy going for a drive? I could show you the town,’ Zara said suddenly as he was about to turn away. She looked down at her feet, tugged at a lock of her hair. ‘If you feel like it, that is, and you’ve got some time. My car’s just around the corner.’

He hesitated, nodded. ‘Why not?’

She talked animatedly as they walked-a little too animatedly, he thought. Like she was nervous. So was he, and he didn’t like the feeling. He worried that his answers to what she was saying were monosyllabic and trite. But the harder he tried to relax around her, the more he felt choked, and hated himself for it. I shouldn’t have agreed to this, he thought desperately.

‘This is it,’ she said, pointing at a sleek black BMW Z4 Roadster convertible at the side of the street. She tossed her handbag in the back of the open-top car, bleeped the locks and they settled into the cream leather seats. She twisted the ignition and the engine rasped into life. As she put the lever in first gear, her hand brushed his. It was only the slightest contact, but she drew her hand away as though she’d touched a hotplate. She blushed. ‘Sorry.’

‘My fault,’ he said, and cringed at his reply. Jesus, Hope.

They drove for a while, and she pointed out various architectural features of San Remo town. He listened, nodded, feigned interest. But he was more interested in her, and he felt bad about it. He shouldn’t be here. This was all wrong.

But after a few miles around San Remo and its outskirts, something else was beginning to crowd his thoughts. Most normal civilians would have no way of telling when a professional surveillance team was following them. But Ben Hope was no normal civilian. He’d spent almost half his life watching his back, and a well-developed knowledge of surveillance techniques, coupled with a sixth sense for when he was being watched, was a combination he knew he could pretty much rely on.

Back in the streets after Kerry’s hotel, he hadn’t been so sure of it. Just a feeling. Then, when the big Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle had passed three times as he walked, he’d started taking more notice. The rider was wearing a black leather jacket and full-face helmet with a tinted black visor, and he couldn’t be sure-but it looked like a woman riding the bike.

When the dark blue Fiat slipped into the traffic behind Zara’s Roadster and sat on their tail for three full kilometres, staying back in the traffic, trying too hard to make it look casual, he knew what was happening. The bright sunlight playing on the windscreen blotted out the faces inside. Two men, he thought. Who were they, and what did they want?

She noticed him looking in the driver’s mirror. ‘Something wrong?’

‘Not exactly wrong,’ he said. ‘But not exactly right. Someone’s following us.’

She looked at him in surprise, then peered in the mirror, frowning with concern. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Pretty sure.’

‘Who?’

‘I was wondering that myself.’

‘What should we do?’

‘We could stop the car, get out, walk back to that coffee bar we just passed, sit tight and see what happens. Or we could act stupid and try to lose them, in which case they’ll know we know.’

‘Who cares what they know?’ she said. ‘I’ll lose them.’

‘You think?’

‘Hold tight.’ She dropped down two gears and the engine note soared as she pressed hard on the gas. Ben felt himself pressed back into his seat. A gap opened up in the traffic ahead and Zara darted the sports car through just before it closed again. She laughed as she swerved across the road to avoid an oncoming van while a chorus of horns sounded angrily. She ignored them and stamped harder on the pedal. The BMW surged powerfully forward. Zara flashed through a red light, skilfully weaving in and out of more honking traffic.

Ben glanced back in the mirror. The dark blue Fiat was gone, left behind somewhere in the mayhem she’d created.

‘How long did you say you’ve been living in Italy?’ he asked over the noise of the engine.

‘We’re never in one spot for long. Harry takes the Scimitar all over the place. Why do you ask?’

‘Just that you drive like an Italian.’

She smiled with pleasure. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment. Did I scare you?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I want to show you something,’ she said. They were heading away from the town now, and out onto a winding coastal road with the sea on one side and sloping forests on the other. She took the bends fast and confidently, braked hard and took a turn to the left, accelerating smartly up a dusty single-track lane.

‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll see.’

The lane led steeply upwards, trees flashing by on each side. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers and vegetation. The storm was still gathering overhead.

Another couple of turns, and Ben was sure that whoever had been following them was truly left behind. But that didn’t make him feel any happier about it.

Zara bumped the car down a rough track and pulled over onto a grassy verge. ‘We’re here?’ he asked.

She smiled. ‘This is it. We can walk the rest of the way.’

He followed her up the winding track through the trees. As they walked, her smile faded. ‘Who would be following us, Ben?’

‘I don’t know.’ Not us, he thought. Whoever it was, it was him they wanted. Which meant it was his concern, and he didn’t want to burden her with it. He put his hand out to reassure her, touched her arm. ‘It was probably nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m just paranoid. Wanted man in several countries. Too many unpaid parking fines.’

She laughed but didn’t move away from the touch of his hand, and he dared let it linger there for a few seconds before snatching it away guiltily. She led him to a break in the trees up ahead. ‘This is what I wanted to show you. Isn’t it fantastic?’

Ben followed her gaze across the bay. From up here you could see the whole coastline, the sea stretching flat out to infinity. The sky was dull and leaden, but the view was spectacular.

‘I come here sometimes just to look at it.’ She paused. ‘And to be alone.’ She frowned up at the darkening clouds. ‘Looks like we’re in for some weather.’

As she said it, the first heavy raindrop spattered on Ben’s shirt. Then another.

‘Here it comes,’ she said. ‘We’d better take cover.’ She pointed. A few hundred yards away, just visible through the greenery, a half-built house stood alone in a weed-strewn building site. ‘Race you to that house,’ she said. Her eyes were lit up with excitement, and her cheeks were flushed.

She took off, sprinting across the rough ground, and he followed her. The rain was coming faster and faster, soaking his shirt. As he ran he watched her, thinking how lithe and athletic she was. She jumped over a low fence and reached the half-finished house a second before him. They ran inside the shelter of the bare block walls, and listened to the rain hammering on the roof. She was giggling, only a little out of breath. Her silk blouse clung to her. She brushed her wet hair back from her face. ‘That was fun. I win.’

He looked around him. ‘Who owns this place?’

‘Someone who ran out of money halfway through the build, I think. It’s been like this for ages. Nobody ever comes here.’ She wiped down her face and neck. ‘God, I’m soaked through.’

The rain outside had become a storm. There was a flash of lightning, closely followed by a long, rumbling clap of thunder. ‘This has been building all day,’ she said.

Ben walked over to the glassless window and looked out. ‘I love storms.’

‘Really? Me too. I can never understand why people are afraid of them.’

Another lightning flash split the dark sky.